A Japanese company is using a quadcopter drone to help its employees know when to pack it in for the day.
Taisei, a Tokyo-based office management company, says that its T-Frend bot will start buzzing around offices next spring. The drone service, operated in partnership with NTT East and Blue Innovation, will fly around …

A campaign launched in Japan has meant anyone partial to diving into a tub of finger lickin' good chicken now has the chance to literally do just that, thanks to the arrival of the KFC Bath Bomb.
The deep fryer of genetically engineered birds plump poulets has teamed up with Japanese novelty retailer Village Vanguard to give …

Digital Realty and Mitsubishi Corporation have entered a joint venture to build big bit barns in Japan.
The two companies will each toss an existing data centre into the new company, which is called “MC Digital Realty”. Next comes a plan to build more data centres, for two reasons.
First is an attempt to tap into the cloud …

Japan's lunar orbiter has found a long, deep tunnel under the Moon's surface.
The find is significant because Earth's Moon is a nasty place: surface temperatures vary wildly, there's radiation galore to contend with and Luna's lack of an atmosphere means the surface is subject to micrometeorite bombardments.
Plans to colonise …

If you've always wanted to pump more than 50 Tbps down a data centre fibre, good news: it can be done. The bad news is that right now, it needs a fair whack of boffinry and equipment.
Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology has laid claim to a four-fold increase over previous fibre transport …

The anti-whaling organization Sea Shepherd Global has said it won't be going after the Japanese fleet of cetacean "research vessels" in their annual pilgrimage to the Southern Pacific – because satellite technology has made the job impossible.
For the past 12 years, the group, set up by former Greenpeace activist Paul Watson, …

Last Friday, someone in Google fat-thumbed a border gateway protocol (BGP) advertisement and sent Japanese Internet traffic into a black hole.
The trouble began when The Chocolate Factory “leaked” a big route table to Verizon, the result of which was traffic from Japanese giants like NTT and KDDI was sent to Google on the …

Pics
TEPCO, the operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, has revealed photos of the facility's flooded interior.
The company sent an aqua-bot into the Reactor Containment Container of Fukushima's Unit 3 last week, revealing grainy images such as the one below.
Unit 3 Reactor Containment Container CRD Housing …

Japanese cops have, for the first time ever, arrested a ransomware maker – a teenage tearaway.
The 14-year-old from Osaka Prefecture in western Japan was collared on June 5 after police tracked him down as the suspected creator of home-grown ransomware that was being spammed out on social media and hosted on an overseas …

Over the past couple of weeks, the price of Bitcoin has gone up 50 per cent, spiking at over $2,700 per unit on Thursday. Demand has been so great that popular exchange Coinbase has been unable to keep up.
"Coinbase has experienced unprecedented traffic and trading volume this week," the exchange warned.
"As a result, …

Japan has decided it's high time it got a grip on just who is conducting high-frequency algorithmic trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
The nation last week passed amendments to its Financial Instruments and Exchange Act requiring high-frequency traders to register with regulators and provide evidence of robust risk …

Japanese boffins have measured the spin-speed of toilet rolls to work out who's on the loo.
The idea, apparently, is that because a throne is a good place to collect health monitoring data, the researchers wanted a reasonably non-invasive ID technique. One that wouldn't get bogged down in the obvious privacy issues of trying …

Radioactive wild boars have become a problem in the evacuation zone around Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.
Reuters reports that as some of the towns near Fukushima re-open, those paving the way for returning residents often see boars strolling the streets.
The newswire says some boars have even attacked humans, leading to …

Japan’s electronic toilet-makers have vowed to clean up the baffling symbols on their techno-khazis so anyone can crimp one off in the Land of the Rising Sun “with peace of mind”.
Kitamura Yen of the Japan Rest Room Industry Association said, in a statement on that august organisation’s website, that the industry had decided …

Japanese defence officials are investigating a reported penetration of the country's high-speed Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) network.
The attacks, which Bloomberg attributes to a possible state-based actor, took place in September but have only now come to light.
The DII network is shared by the country's Defence …

A man from Kyoto in Japan has been arrested for nibbling a young woman's foot.
Since 2012, Kyoto has been plagued by the perpetrator of a series of criminal acts of podophilia whom cops had dubbed "the foot licker".
Back in July, Akira Nishiyama, 56, allegedly lured a woman in her twenties into the driver's seat of his car to …

Apple has again been hit with a relatively small bill for skirting tax laws, this time in Japan.
A report from national broadcaster NHK World claims that the Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau has told Apple to cough up $120m (12.3bn Yen) to cover back taxes that the Cupertino giant failed to pay.
The report notes that Apple has …

Japan fired a shot across Britain's bows at the G20 yesterday, publishing a “message to the United Kingdom” warning that Japanese companies might relocate their head offices out of the UK if Brexit trade negotiations with the EU don't favour them.
The 15-page document, couched in the clipped yet polite prose of international …